The Aftermath

by Samuel C. Florman

  Finally, the good captain, at a meeting of the Coordinating Committee, let slip a few remarks about the nuptials being planned. Inlanders on the committee—Stephen Healey, Peter Mavimbela, Lucas Moloko, and several others—made a few notes, and shortly before the appointed day, special shipments of meat and fresh produce came rolling into Engineering Village.

  Attire for the bridal party presented a more daunting challenge. For one thing, members of the traveling seminar had been instructed not to bring along anything by way of formal dress. Even more serious, after a few months of fairly rugged living, most people's clothes were beginning to show signs of wear and tear. The new clothes being made under the master technology enterprise were simple woolen homespuns, not exactly suitable for a gala occasion. Again, the ship's crew came to the rescue. Fine linen tablecloths were found amid the salvaged supplies. And several members of the laundry staff turned out to be expert seamstresses, willing to volunteer their services for the cause. In short order, Mary, Roxy, and Sarah were fitted with lovely white gowns. Women from one of the Zulu communities near Ulundi sent a gift of beadwork that provided an elegant finishing touch.

  Somewhat abashed by their sudden celebrity, the three brides announced that their gowns would be made available to others in the future who chose to add a touch of formality to their wedding ceremonies. Thinking further about all the attention being focused on the forthcoming big day, we sent out a general invitation for other couples to join in.

  There was at first some interest expressed, but in the end no takers. Everybody agreed that they didn't want a mass wedding like those employed in the past by certain religious sects. And there developed a friendly willingness to let the six of us have our mini-extravaganza. Sarah, in her daily work, had become widely known and much beloved. Roxy was a favorite among the ship's crew. And Mary was one of the more popular young engineers. Tom, as I have noted, had become one of the acknowledged stars among the engineering elite. Herb and I, as ubiquitous secretaries at important meetings, had gotten on familiar terms with a lot of people. So we were not begrudged our special moment in the sun. A gala triple wedding in June it would be!

  For clergy, we were faced with an embarrassment of riches. The cruise ship line often recruited clerics from the major faiths, offering them free vacations plus a small stipend. Our trip, however, was something of an exception. In designing the seminar, my father and his colleagues had conceived of a session on "Engineering and the Spirit," and to lead it they invited two Catholic priests, three ministers of various Protestant denominations, and two rabbis. (Inelusion of the Eastern faiths was considered but deemed outside the competence of the planning group.) In addition, three or four spouses of the engineer participants were ordained ministers of one sort or another, and—just in case anyone was looking for a completely secular approach—several spouses were judges. Not to be forgotten, of course, Captain Nordstrom himself was always available. So the problem was less finding acceptable people than being careful not to hurt anybody's feelings.

  Mary zeroed in on Father Jim O'Reilly, a jolly, florid priest right out of Central Casting, who happened to hail from a parish very close to hers in New York City. The good father might have presented a jolly front, but he soon made it clear that in matters of faith he was a stern mentor. The post-holocaust circumstances made not the slightest difference in the way he regarded the sacred obligations of matrimony. A thousand comets, he told Roxy, would not shake his faith or his view of his responsibilities—and hers. Happily, Tom, the nonchalant agnostic, was willing to promise that any children resulting from the union would be baptized and reared as Catholics.

  Roxy, following up on Herb's wishes, contacted the two rabbis. The one from Philadelphia proved too sober for her taste. But she took a liking to David Silverman, a young man recently selected to head a synagogue in Denver. Silverman explained that in ordinary circumstances, an Orthodox or Conservative rabbi would not be authorized to perform an interfaith wedding, and that even he, a Reform rabbi, would like to see the prospective bride studying Judaism and considering eventual conversion. Obviously, these were not ordinary circumstances, and David Silverman struggled with the idea that the cosmic devastation might suggest radically new reforms beyond those that were in his tradition. To whom could he turn for guidance? Assuming that Jerusalem had been destroyed once again, what did this portend for the Jewish people—for the human race? The young rabbi had always prided himself on being reasonable, within limits, but in the present circumstance how was he to judge what reasonable meant? As it turned out, Roxy was enthusiastic about the idea of studying Judaism and attended a few informal study sessions. She listened carefully to everything the rabbi had to tell her, and then disarmed and bemused him with the ways in which she sought to merge Jewish traditions into her quasi-Buddhist faith.

  Sarah, aboard ship, had become friendly with Ruth Peters, minister to a Presbyterian congregation in northern New Hampshire, who had herself been married—to an environmental engineer—just before coming on the trip. After meeting the other clergy, and giving the matter significant thought, Sarah decided that Ruth would be a perfect choice. My idea of a minister ran more along the lines of a fatherly gentleman with gray hair and a sonorous voice. But this was a new world. Actually, when it came to women in the clergy, it had been a new world for quite a few years, and I just had not been paying attention. Whatever—as the kids used to say (and some of them here still do)—I was to be married to a young woman by a young woman, and soon became accustomed to the idea.

  The notion of legal proprieties, of course, was something of an anomaly. The typical marriage ceremony incorporated the words "by the authority vested in me by..." By whom? By what? In answer to popular sentiment, the Coordinating Committee, at one of its first meetings, passed a resolution stating that all individuals who before the Event had been authorized to perform weddings would be so empowered in the new society being formed. Some day there would be debates about the laws of marriage and divorce; but not yet.

  As for location, the prospective brides chose a spot on the beach where we had first come ashore. Although, as I have noted, Engineering Village was established a short distance inland, adjoining Lake Mzingai, there were still some facilities at the ocean beach, including a bamboo pavilion with a canvas roof that had served as a gathering place from the earliest days. Everyone agreed that Herb should have his huppah. In fact, we all decided to marry under the huppah—a lovely trellis, also bamboo—festooned with the wild-flowers that had bloomed during the now-disappearing summer and fall.

  Music was no problem, since members of the ship's orchestra took meticulous care of their instruments, and were happy to have an occasion to display their talents. For a pre-ceremony recital, Mary, Roxy, and Sarah each chose several selections, including such semiclassical chestnuts as "Oh, Promise Me." The idea was to start with traditional melodies that would evoke the past, pay homage to a world that was no more, and proclaim our intention to preserve the best qualities of that world. This concept was carried through in the selection of two wedding marches, Lohengrin (Here Comes the Bride) for the processional and Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream for after the ceremony.

  Herb protested that this was too corny, but Roxy persuaded him that this was the point, and that old-fashioned sentiment was not to be scorned. She assured him that the music planned for later in the proceedings would include material unusual enough to satisfy the most exotic taste. When he pressed her for details, she put her finger to her lips and smiled. "That's our secret," she said.

  After many discussions, we decided to forgo attendants, except for immediate family. At first this didn't seem fair, since Mary, Sarah, Herb, and I had at least one parent with us, while Roxy and Tom, both of whom had come to the Queen of Africa on their own, had lost their entire families in the Event. But Roxy said that she never had family who would have come to her wedding anyhow ... and Tom insisted that his loss should not affect the planning in a negative way.


  The brides agreed that they would serve as maids of honor for each other, and the grooms made the same arrangements concerning the best man. Mary and Sarah were to be escorted down the aisle by their fathers. Roxy asked Captain Nordstrom if he would do the same for her, and he was delighted to accept. Mary and Herb both had younger sisters—much younger—and they would add to the festivities as flower girls. Sarah and I observed, not for the first time, that we were both the products of one-child families.

  "That's why you're both spoiled rotten," Herb said, also not for the first time.

  We three couples wanted to be married together, but in separate ceremonies, so a certain amount of tactical planning was required. We decided that the grooms, clergy, and non-marching parents would first gather by the huppah. Then the flower girls would do their thing, followed by the three brides and escorts. The brides were to be spaced far enough apart so that each would have the equivalent of her own processional. After the three couples had assembled, the ceremonies would be performed in sequence. Clearly, no individual ceremony could be too long. On the other hand, there was to be no feeling of hurry. A starting time of three P.M. was selected, in the hope that the sun of the late autumn afternoon would bring its warmth to the proceedings.

  How to select the order in which the couples were to be married? Mary came up with the creative idea that it should be done according to the ages of the three religions: Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant in that sequence. In the absence of any more inspired notions, this is what we incorporated into our plan.

  —————

  Somehow the weeks passed.

  Thinking about the wedding provided me with a welcome distraction between meetings of the Expanded Defense Committee; but thoughts of invasion and battle were never far from my mind. Luckily, among the community at large, the recruitment of a militia seemed not to be a cause of special concern. The average person was too busy to be worried by a few signs of military activity.

  As we approached the month of June—which would mark a half year after the Event—our industrial revolution gathered momentum in ways that the most optimistic planners could not have foreseen. With brickworks and sawmills in operation, and cement available for mortar and concrete, the building crews of Shaka Enterprises were able to show their stuff. Buildings appeared like mushrooms overnight. Residential units were designed mainly in the form of functional attached housing—brick walls and concrete floor slabs, with thatched roofs on top of wood or bamboo framing—while open-sided sheds served to protect most factory operations. For multipurpose community structures, stone and bamboo were the materials of choice. Indoor plumbing was still a future consideration, although there were heartening signs of water lines and sewers being installed.

  The blacksmith forges were busy day and night; and the tools they turned out in great quantity became increasingly serviceable. The smelting furnaces were completed on schedule, and there was great excitement when they produced the first glowing ingots of iron. The machine-tool masters waited covetously for the metals that would allow them to produce the devices they had designed. As soon as these devices were operative, steam engines were scheduled to be manufactured, hopefully by year's end. Engineers argued long into the night about which machines should have priority and which sources of energy would be developed first. There were clever designs for internal combustion engines; but it was impossible, in the short term, to develop adequate supplies of fuel. The electrical engineers were doing exciting work, but still on an experimental level, inhibited by the shortage of copper. Steam was the inevitable first choice.

  "The beauty of a steam engine," as Tom Swift explained it one evening to our Focus Group, "is that you simply burn wood or coal, heat water to convert it to vapor, use the vapor to push a piston, and off you go."

  "That sounds so primitive," Herb said. "All these hotshot engineers, and we'll be chug-chugging along like in the nineteenth century."

  "You should be sending congratulations," Tom said, "instead of complaints about what's impossible. As a matter of fact, some of the steam experts are working on improvements to the steam engine that may astound us all. They're taking it as a special challenge: How do we improve the technology of an earlier age, using the latest knowledge we have of mechanics, materials, and thermodynamics?

  "And by the way," Tom continued, "if you want to see hotshot engineers in action, come visit my R and D laboratory just outside of Engineering Village. We're making great progress on developing next-generation plastics, and we're not waiting for petroleum, either. We're extracting lactic acid from corn and turning it into a plastic that we'll use for a variety of products. Right near my operation, the electrical folk are making amazing plans for the use of solar energy, nuclear power, even fusion. You can't imagine how many exciting things are being planned."

  At this point, Tom spun around, leaped into the air, and literally kicked his heels together. "We'll make this place into Utopia!" he whooped.

  "Be careful what you wish for," Sarah said. "In the original Utopia, envisioned by Thomas More in the early 1500s, premarital sex was punished by compulsory celibacy for life, adultery by slavery, and repeated adultery by death. In that ideal community you really had to shape up or ship out."

  "Well," Herb said in a deep and solemn tone, "we're all about to enter the respectable state of matrimony. That must be considered a step in the right direction."

  We enjoyed a good laugh, and then launched into a semiserious debate about what sort of rules a real Utopia ought to have.

  As we merrily planned our ideal society of the future, it occurred to me that a hostile force—possibly setting sail at this very moment—was scheming our destruction. Instead of dreaming about our happy tomorrows, we should be planning to fight for our lives.

  In fact, there was that night another secret meeting of the Expanded Defense Committee that would keep me up well past my bedtime. I was getting used to it.

  13

  The dark sea swelled in white-spumed waves beneath an angry sky. The wind whipped Queen Ranavolana's fleet forward, toward its destination: the coast of KwaZulu Natal and the settlement of survivors of the Queen of Africa. The pirate queen stood on the deck of the King Radama, her flagship, with its blood red sails and crew of savage sea warriors. It was the third day out from Madagascar, the day before the planned assault.

  The first mate approached, shuffling warily into her regal presence, and reported the captain's estimate that they would achieve landfall in seven or eight hours.

  "Good," replied the queen. "We will land several miles up the coast from our planned attack point. Rest tonight, and strike tomorrow."

  She wore a bright bandanna that held her hair in place and exposed her face to the wind and salt air. She loved the feeling of being out on the open sea. Looking around at the motley fleet that accompanied the King Radama, she observed a dozen boats, some of which struggled to match the pace set by her vessel. She had already pushed her pirate crews to their limit—and beyond. Could she expect them to fight tomorrow, to kill or capture all who stood in their path? What kind of resistance, if any, might there be? Had the two fugitives reached the South African coast after they had escaped by boat—and if so, what had they revealed? No matter the answers to these questions, Queen Ranavolana was confident her invading force would quickly overwhelm and subdue the enemy. It was, after all, her destiny.

  "Signal to the other ships," she ordered the first mate. "And tell the captain to make full sail until we sight land."

  She smiled as he scampered away. The gods, or fates, or God Himself—or Herself—had been kind to Queen Ranavolana. A month earlier, some of her pirates had discovered a ghost ship in the Indian Ocean, an abandoned cargo vessel that contained stores of rice and coffee, as well as a cache of automatic rifles and ammunition. This find was fortuitous on two counts. It gave her a greater sense of security to know that the survivors on Madagascar would be adequately fed during her absence. And it was reassuring to have her men bett
er armed for the battle ahead. There had been great rejoicing in her island kingdom when their good fortune was announced.

  For several weeks, the pirates and their "recruits"—young native men pressed into the service of the queen—had drilled relentlessly as the leadership drew up plans for the raid. In total, their force numbered about four hundred able-bodied men, trained to kill first and ask questions later; much later, if at all. Each man was armed with a machete or large hunting knife. A hundred or so carried the auto-rifles that had been salvaged from the abandoned cargo ship along with a half-dozen clips of ammunition each. Some forty or fifty were armed with pistols ranging from ancient Colt revolvers to sleek semiautomatics, with anywhere from a handful to a hundred rounds to fit each gun.

  Queen Ranavolana had pored over her "textbooks" and consulted with her lieutenants in the planning phase, using maps and whatever intelligence could be gleaned from anyone who had ever been to the South African shore. She herself had spent some time there during her wandering years and she conjured up dim memories of the coastal terrain. Finally, she sent out several nighttime reconnaissance expeditions to determine the location of the targeted village and its beachfront facility.

  The plan of attack evolved into a simple two-pronged maneuver: a land force of about one hundred fifty men, led by Yook Louie and Errol Waddell, would approach from the north, while Queen Ranavolana's naval force with the larger number of men under Jama Chaudri and Raman Patel would attack the beach head-on.